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Reviews

""Stepanova's prose work is discursive, expansively imaginative in its musings and digressions. The translation by Dugdale is lucid, vivid and fluid."" -- Barbara Conaty - Library Journal ""Captivating and capacious... The novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement."" -- Abdulrazak Gurnah ""Poignant, ironizing its own ironies, as M finds two wrongs—any number of wrongs—never make a right."""" -- Michael Autrey - Booklist ""This is an intimate and profound study of liminality and identity from one of the most important writers of our time."" -- Pierce Alquist - Book Riot ""Dugdale’s translation is a loving one, beautifully rendering Stepanova’s melodic and rhythmic prose into precise English… With The Disappearing Act, Stepanova’s talents have grown to include a magical quality, and it leaves me longing for more of her tricks."" -- Olga Ziberbourg - On the Seawall ""Expect entrancing prose suffused with wry observations, a little humour and memories of lost worlds—the world lost with the fall of the Soviet Union; the world lost to Vladimir Putin; the world lost to the Ukraine war—more redolent of great poetry than contemporary fiction."" -- Frieze ""Existing somewhere between dream and reality, The Disappearing Act is a meditation on exile, identity, and the allure of disappearing completely from one of contemporary Russia's most critical voices."" -- Linnea Gradin - Electric Lit

""Stepanova's prose work is discursive, expansively imaginative in its musings and digressions. The translation by Dugdale is lucid, vivid and fluid."" -- Barbara Conaty - Library Journal ""Captivating and capacious... The novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement."" -- Abdulrazak Gurnah ""Poignant, ironizing its own ironies, as M finds two wrongs—any number of wrongs—never make a right."""" -- Michael Autrey - Booklist ""This is an intimate and profound study of liminality and identity from one of the most important writers of our time."" -- Pierce Alquist - Book Riot ""Dugdale’s translation is a loving one, beautifully rendering Stepanova’s melodic and rhythmic prose into precise English… With The Disappearing Act, Stepanova’s talents have grown to include a magical quality, and it leaves me longing for more of her tricks."" -- Olga Ziberbourg - On the Seawall

""Stepanova’s companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour. Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and Sebald."" -- Rachel Polonsky - Times Literary Supplement

Stepanova's companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour. Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and Sebald.--Rachel Polonsky ""Times Literary Supplement""

""Stepanova's prose work is discursive, expansively imaginative in its musings and digressions. The translation by Dugdale is lucid, vivid and fluid."" -- Barbara Conaty - Library Journal ""Captivating and capacious... The novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement."" -- Abdulrazak Gurnah ""Poignant, ironizing its own ironies, as M finds two wrongs—any number of wrongs—never make a right."""" -- Michael Autrey - Booklist ""This is an intimate and profound study of liminality and identity from one of the most important writers of our time."" -- Pierce Alquist - Book Riot ""Dugdale’s translation is a loving one, beautifully rendering Stepanova’s melodic and rhythmic prose into precise English… With The Disappearing Act, Stepanova’s talents have grown to include a magical quality, and it leaves me longing for more of her tricks."" -- Olga Ziberbourg - On the Seawall ""Expect entrancing prose suffused with wry observations, a little humour and memories of lost worlds—the world lost with the fall of the Soviet Union; the world lost to Vladimir Putin; the world lost to the Ukraine war—more redolent of great poetry than contemporary fiction."" -- Marko Gluhaich - Frieze ""Existing somewhere between dream and reality, The Disappearing Act is a meditation on exile, identity, and the allure of disappearing completely from one of contemporary Russia's most critical voices."" -- Linnea Gradin - Electric Lit ""An essential book written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present's failure to learn lessons from the past."" -- Catherine Taylor - The Irish Times ""The novel provides a striking articulation of the incongruity in M’s anonymity…M does not so much go off the grid as temporarily disappear into it—she finds herself in movement without the structure of departure and arrival."" -- Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen - Kismet Magazine ""Beautifully suffocating…A gem of literature."" -- Madeline Schultz - Chicago Review of Books ""Russian poet Maria Stepanova anatomizes the moral attributes of language and identity in an elegiac novel mourning the disgrace of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. . . Striking at the heart of a pressing crisis for a new wave of emigrants, The Disappearing Act is a concise investigation into the burden of national guilt and the hope for personal transformation."" -- Brock Covington - Open Letters Review ""This autofictional blend of memory and fable tracks a changing sense of self... echoes of poetry, skillfully conveyed by translator Sasha Dugdale."" -- Anna Aslanyan - The Guardian ""The Disappearing Act is about what happens when the story of one’s life cleaves in uncomfortable, incongruous ways… Stepanova’s short vignettes—that move elegantly between M’s external and internal worlds—keep the story skipping along."" -- Matthew Janney - Financial Times

Author Information

Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Maria Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poetry collections Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and winners of PEN Translates awards, and War of the Beasts and the Animals was also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Her novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale's translation. She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory, and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.   Maria Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In 2022 she was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for a book of poetry, Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes). She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile. Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox, published by Carcanet (UK) in 2024. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem ""Joy"" won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016.  Dugdale's translation of Maria Stepanova’s prose work In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections and work by a number of Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva. For many years she specialized in translating Russian-language new writing for theaters in the UK and US, including the New York Public Theater and the UK’s Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. 

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